Special Prosecutor Katica Janeva told the press today that she still has no response as to how Sekerim Ahmeti, an ethnic Albanian from Macedonia living in Chicago, came to the possession of the cache of wiretaps which Janeva is supposed to act upon and keep safely.

Maybe he took them from Youtube. What can I say? Bye, Janeva told the journalists. Last week Janeva said that she can’t guarantee that the tapes were given to Sekerim Ahmeti by people in her office.

Ahmeti has been publishing wiretaps of conversations under the name El Cheka, and these cover mostly the leadership of the DUI party, Ali Ahmeti and his chief lieutenants, and the tapes contain indications of crime and abuse of office, such as making political deals about the appointment of judges.

The cache is believed to have originated in the UBK intelligence service, by a group of rogue agents who recorded conversations of Government officials and shared them with the then opposition SDSM party. SDSM leader Zoran Zaev used the tapes and the political crisis which they sparked to seize power, owing to significant international support.

While Zaev was releasing selective tapes meant to portray the then ruling VMRO-DPMNE party in a negative light, it was warned that other criminal groups would use the cache to blackmail politicians and businessmen. The tapes were used at least twice by people other than SDSM and Janeva’s office, allegedly for blackmail purposes.